Checking the stimulus scorecard

Inter Lake editorial

Vice President Joe Biden made an enticing offer this week: "To those who say our economic decisions have not produced jobs, have not produced and simply have not worked, I say take a look around."

We'll take him up on that, because the federal stimulus certainly hasn't worked as advertised, and well, we're waiting for any evidence that it's worked at all.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was hurried through Congress in February, with no lawmakers actually reading it, under the pretense that it was absolutely necessary to 'save or create" millions of jobs and to hold unemployment below 8 percent.

Well, unemployment is at 9.5 percent, with wide expectations that it will top 10 percent in months to come. There have been 2.6 million jobs lost since the Obama administration took office, regardless of the 'saved or created" claims of the administration.

Locally, we have witnessed hundreds of job losses, and we have yet to detect stimulus funding "hitting the ground" in a way that has obviously generated jobs.

But Biden isn't all wrong. He asserted that stimulus funding has prevented the lay off of "thousands' of teachers, firefighters and cops. And that may be true, because from our vantage point, it appears that the only thing the stimulus package has stimulated so far has been government.

And sadly, that is the primary reason for the belated dispersal of stimulus funding into the economy. It was entirely predictable that funneling huge amounts of money through dozens of bureaucracies was not going to be an efficient exercise, despite all the talk about the urgent need to direct the money toward 'shovel-ready" infrastructure projects.

Less than 10 percent of the whopping $787 billion in funding has been distributed so far. To be sure, the money eventually will hit the economy, but from our vantage point it looks like it will be going into very select sectors, such as highway construction or home insulation contractors. There will be some trickle-down benefits, but there really is very little relief destined for other types of businesses.

In fairness, the stimulus package did include some tax relief, but it was not enough. A much more significant tax break - some suggested a sizable payroll tax reduction to benefit employers and employees - would have produced a true, widely and evenly dispersed, economic jump start.

But the Obama administration is now stuck in a Keynesian quandary that Biden summed up pretty well, saying that the country must spend money to keep from going bankrupt. Problem is, the government is already printing and spending money it just doesn't have.